The government has really lost its collective sanity. Their only anser to the economic meltdown is more of the financial irresponsibility that got us into the mess and now we find their anser to rising unpopularity among voters is more of the kind of control freakery that made us all hate them in the first place. Read on to learn more...

If you were ever a fan of the 1980s and 1990s television comedies Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister you will remember that the terminally mediocre and very John-Majoresque politician Jim Hacker was propelled into Downing Street after standing up for British sausages against a tsunami of bureaucratic regulation emanating from the headquarters of the EU.

We need a Jim Hacker now, not to stand against the Eurorats but to resist the roll out of New Labour’s nanny state which is attacking all our great British traditions, the latest being our pies.

The British love of pie – eating goes back at least to the time of King Alfred the Great had just handed over a few recipes for pies to the marauding Danes he would not have had to give them half the kingdom (the Danelaw) and half the annual tax revenue (the Danegeld) Like most upper class southerners Alfred underestimated the cultural importance of pies as do New Labour’s politically correct tofu eaters. This treasonous government, not satisfied with its war on terror, war on drugs, war on binge drinking, war on anti-social behaviour and war of fun has launched a war on pies.

The whining, nannying busybodies and pokenoses who advise the government on matters of health and how to prevent it are, we learn in today's news, proposing that draconian limits on ingredients be made law, thus effectively removing from pies things like saturated fat, salt, meat and everything that makes them tasty and comforting and great to eat, everything in fact that makes them pies rather than the bland much government inspectors want to make us eat.

What we want to eat (apart from co-author Fatsally who doesn’t do pastry) is a large portion of steak pie, chips, extra chips to give us another portion of veg. towards our five a day, a streak pudding on the side, with battered prawns to start and a deep fried Mars Bar for dessert. AND WE WANT IT NOW IF NOT SOONER.

They are doing this only because they care about us of course. They care that we increase our risk of heart disease by eating enjoyable food, they care that we are damaging heart, liver, brain and arteries by having a small shandy now and then or eating a chocolate snack, that we risk serious injury by horse riding, rock climbing, going out for a jog in chilly weather or sliding down Ben Nevis on a Grand Piano. The care in the way Big Brother cared in George Orwell’s 1984, they care because they need to make us dependent, because they want to control us.

Well it is not going to happen. Controlling our pies is a step too far. Already people in The Land Of Pie Eaters (a triangle around Wigan, St. Helens and Bolton) are manning the barricades and the old war cry is being raised:

THEY CAN TAKE OUR FREEDOM BUT THEY WILL NEVER TAKE OUR PIES!

More humour every day from Boggart Blog

Read Brussels correspondent on how Recesion Proof Bureaucrats are insulating themselves fromn the effects of the slump while the rest of us suffer

More food realted humour:
The Dinner Plates Of Old England Ian's comic verse takes aim at the invasion of British dinner plates by foreign food and the assumption that if it's not British it must be superior. The traditional food of these isles, if it really is traditional and not the bland fare of the Protestant reformation, is a match for any.